Rethinking Sellars’ Myth of the Given: From the Epistemological to the Modal Relevance of Givenness in Kant and Hegel

Abstract

ABSTRACTHere, I pursue consequences, for the interpretation of Sellars’ critique of the ‘Myth of the Given’, of separating the modal significance that Kant attributed to empirical intuition from the epistemological role it also played for him. It is argued that Kant’s approach to modality in the Critique of Pure Reason can best be understood as a transcendental variation on Leibniz’s earlier ‘possibilist’ approach that treated the actual world as just one of a variety of possible alternative worlds. In this context, empirical intuitions seem to work like the mythical Givens subject to Sellars’ critique. This Kantian possibilism is then contrasted with an ‘actualist’ alternative approach to modality found in the contemporary work of Robert Stalnaker, but also recognizable in Hegel. In particular, the role of immediate perceptual judgments in Hegel is likened to that played by ‘witness statements’ in Robert Stalnaker’s attempt to distinguish the logic of judgments about the actual world from those about its alternate possibilities.